Last year (I was shocked that it's been over a year!) I read this article (and others like it) about how you could get your iPhone location data pretty simply out of the backups that iTunes keeps on your computer. Putting it in the "hey I should do that before I upgrade to 4.3.3 and lose the ability to do it" basket, I put it off for the previously mentioned year.

Today my phone crashed and I was reminded to do this so I can upgrade the OS on it finally.

There's a few utilities out there that will do it. I tried one that only showed 190 points (out of the 12452 that I have). Then I tried iPhoneTrackerWin which at least worked. How cool is this!

But it didn't have any sort of export (apart from a log).

So then I tried nphonetrack which outputs a raw csv and a kml file you can load into Google Earth.

Here's a few more from iPhoneTrackerWin

Canberra.. have ranged all over here!

Syd-uh-nee!

Visiting Chay and David last year

Jordan didn't rate a mention

Heathrow, Leavesden Studios and Windsor feature in addition to London

Some weird stuff happened in Japan. Sapporo and central Hokkaido didn't rate a mention, yet there was a stack of stuff around Sendai. Maybe it transposed some stuff for a while?

Over nine years ago I bought four angels. They were the second batch of fish I put into my first fish tank. Over the years the other fish slowly died off. The last remaining fish out of my "originals" was a lone female angel. Since I'd had her the longest, she became the favourite out of all the fish that have come and gone (except maybe George, who's death was particularly sad because of how it happened).

While I was away on my last holiday she died :(

Because I'd never had any success breeding the angels, and because every other fish I put in there died fairly quickly, I gave up and decided that when she died I'd clean out the tank and start again with baby angels.

So that's what I did on the weekend. Spent a couple of hours cleaning surfaces and bits of the filter system that hadn't been cleaned in the nine and a half years since I got the tank.

Thursday night was BBQ night at @CLBradley's with his family, Aquila and Robert, which was lovely.

Friday morning was utterly miserable (dark and rainy in the morning) and the sweetie was sick so wasn't going to work so wasn't going to give me a lift and I didn't feel like catching the bus in the rain, so I ended up working from home.

Friday night/Saturday morning was terrible. Didn't get to bed til after midnight, and then at 4am got an alert which I'd never had to deal with before, so was up trying to deal with that during hurty when I'd run out of some of my painkillers. Not at all pleasant. Went back to bed a bit after five, but was too cold to go back to sleep properly. Then the patching alerts started at 8am. The final straw was the sweetie playing a fart noise on his phone right in my face which jolted me awake once and for all.

So not too much got done on Saturday. Did our shopping in the afternoon. And over to Potty's to watch Tower Heist. Which actually kept me awake and wasn't as completely stupid as your average Ben Stiller movie is.

Had a great sleep last night, nearly eight hours of fairly solid sleep which was awesome.

Today was just pottering around the house.

Then out to Hardly Normal to buy a buffet that we'd been wanting to buy almost since we bought our dining table three years ago. And as we were walking around I saw a lounge suite that I basically fell in love with, and accidentally spent another $2000 that I certainly wasn't planning to! Impulse buying like that goes against every fibre of my being, but after I'd wanted it but then pulled back and was trying to talk ourselves out of it, or at least ponder it for a while, the sweetie decided that he really liked it too and convinced me to get it after all. Ooops!!

Then home to work on the fish tank and dinner.

Oh, and it seems my parents are back from their post holiday holiday .. hi! :)

I'm totally going to have Wii arm tomorrow. Might have been playing Mario and Sonic and the London 2012 Olympic Games :) Haven't played through all of it yet so the jury is still out on whether it's better than the original or not. Some things so far are a bit more annoying, but there's a couple of new events which could work out well. The party mode is a bit "huh? what's going on?" but I suppose that's cause I'm no good at video games. Will have to get Nat&Andrew over soon to help ;)

And I'm going to the VIP dinner at Brick Expo this year.. should be awesome :) Book early if you want to go too!

Except for feeling tense the whole way through because you just *know* that everyone is going to die heh.

And there's a few things I had to go look up to figure out what they were about.

Like the opening scene. Some guy swallows black goop and dies. What the? OK so reading online it seems that that is the way they create life on a planet, by having the black goo mix with the humanoid DNA and go off and do its thing. Or some such thing.

Or David infecting Holloway and trying to get Shaw pregnant with the alien. Why?? Getting too late to find a definitive answer on this.

As others have said, David is the best character in the movie, especially his channelling of Lawrence of Arabia :)

I just watched the video Dave2 linked to.. it has plenty of other questions!

Other than that.. my day started with me starting to work on something that really hasn't moved since I left it before I went away. I got to work on it for about ten minutes before the interruptions started. They didn't stop all day. Doh!

The week started off badly and never got any better. I barely slept all week. I was out or late home every night. I ate about two weeks' worth of food, and only did half a weeks' worth of walking. I had to spend a day in "training" today where I didn't actually learn anything.

Strangely enough, the three days at work were actually pretty good.

But I just didn't get enough time at home :(

Out again for dinner tonight for Annie's birthday. It was a very rushed affair, as we got there ten minutes late, by which time the kids had mostly eaten, and the girls wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, but didn't want to go home with Stu so Annie could stay and chat to us. Yah.

So I had something like 438 mails in my inbox this morning. Which got cut very quickly down to 148 when I removed all the mailing list and auto notification type mails. So didn't take me all that long to get through it all which was nice. Was kept busy most of the day anyway, without me even needing to look at my pre-trip todo list.

After work I met up with Luc at the Wig & Pen (which hasn't moved yet! win!). Luc was won over by the nice beers they have there, and gave it his stamp of approval :) I had a "Lunch with the Monks" and a "Big Ass Barley Wine". Luc also had a Lunch with the Monks and a Dubble Trubble. Stu arrived and had an Obama IPA. We pretty much just talked about travel and Japan. Was a fun night.

After Luc left for his dinner meetup, the sweetie and I went to the Asia Cafe for dinner. We had soft shelled crab (nice, but something super spicy in the salad mix burnt my tongue - a lot! Hurt for ages. And no it wasn't a piece of the red chili - that's easy to avoid - perhaps some seeds that had come loose). Also had some Honey Mustard Steak which was very yummy.

I've been feeling pretty anxious/depressed the past couple of days because I have to go back to work. And not because I hate work. Actually work is pretty good, except for when there's so much to do that I can't keep up which is a lot of the time but moving on ...

No it's because when I have to go to work I can't be at home. I'd be perfectly happy spending all day every day at home. Like during my uni holidays. It's been, what, sixteen? seventeen? years since I had a three month holiday and I STILL MISS THEM!!! Oh they were bliss. To get up every morning for months on end and be able to do whatever you liked every day! It was magic!

Sadly, if I want money to be able to travel I have to go to work. But that doesn't make it any easier.

I'd still rather be at home.

Just sayin'.

Felt like I didn't do much today (because I didn't tick much off the todo list) but I suppose I did a reasonable amount. And the sweetie cooked dinner and we spent some time together which was nice so we're thinking maybe that should be more of a regular Sunday night thing heh.

In the afternoon went to the poultry show at epic, something we haven't done since 2006 (where I managed to get myself in the newspaper :) ) Seems it was only $2 entry back then. $5 at the moment, although there was so much chaos when we got there we didn't actually know where to pay so ended up just going in for nothing.

It's Ferdinand!

This turkey fluffed itself up whenever we got near it and fluffed up our jackets in front of it, very cool :)

Afterwards we went over to Scott and Kerry's for a little while.

Leftovers for dinner and spent the evening fighting with our stoopid Cisco router (trying to fix up MRTG and I couldn't figure out how to get it to show active DHCP leases or make SNMP work). Hate. Also watched some Big Bang Theory.

I was slightly shocked to realise this pile of newspapers I've been meaning to go through dated to early 2009 - ie, just after we moved into this house!

The whole lot is in the recycle bin now :)

Other than that, had a lovely day. Went into town and had breakfast with the sweetie at Cafe Essen. Walked around Civic for a little while. Then out to Jamo to do our food shopping. Was a really nice morning with the sweetie.

Came back and turned on the heater and had a nice quiet afternoon doing a mix of computer things and non computer things (like unpacking - still haven't finished that!). I put a beef stew in the slow cooker and it's been bubbling away all afternoon. Can't wait!

Inspired by Luc's post, I thought I'd document what tech stuff I took away with me this trip.

So here's everything tech-related that I took away with me, including all baggies.

Cameras

Three cameras - my Canon 500D, the Sony TX10 "Random Camera", and a Sony handicam. I used the video camera a reasonable amount in the middle east, but not so much after I got to Europe.

Phone

My old iPhone 3GS. I didn't upgrade before I went away because if anything happened to it I'd have been very sad. If anything happened to the old one well then I could just get a new one when I got home.

Laptop

The Asus EeePC. Very cute, but not as cute as an ultrabook ;) Maybe next laptop ;) After two months of typing on that laptop and using its screen, it's very weird to come home to my super huge monitor and chunky keyboard and mouse!

GPS

Photomate 887 Lite. This is seriously the coolest device *ever*. It recorded almost my entire trip, except for between Hamburg and Kolding. I've yet to add up how far I actually travelled.

Backups

Multiple USB memory sticks. Sadly the 64gb one Stu got me for Christmas died, so I had to replace it with several 16gb sticks along the way. I didn't get the whole trip onto them, but did a backup of missing stuff to Stu's computer when I got to Japan so I could have a non-platter backup. Also a 320gb usb-powered external hard drive. One cable, very small and light, great for travelling with.

Power Converters/Adapters

One for the UK and one for Europe (also the middle east). I lost the European one somewhere between Cairo and Paris, so had to go buy a new one. Also an Australian double adapter so I could charge other things at the same time as using the laptop. Stu took a Japanese adapter to Japan, so I used that when I got there.

Other Charging Stuff

The "brick" for my iPhone, the battery charger for the Canon and the charger for the video camera (which had a long cable). As well as the charger for the laptop.

Cables

I got a super cool tiny little iPhone cable which I used to charge the phone off the laptop (and transfer photos). It's 10cm long - great for travelling! A ~30cm figure eight cable, also a good short length. The cable for random camera. HATE Sony and their proprietary cables >:( Why can't they use mini or micro usb??? A mini usb cable used to charge the GPS. It's fairly long, I could have taken a super short one, but I'm used to carrying that one with me everywhere, as it lives in the camera bag.

Other

A small mouse, my jetstar in-ear headphones that work on planes as well as regular devices, and a 12V usb double adapter. Couldn't get the adapter to work in the hire car we had, don't know why. Didn't need it though as the GPS was built into the car and there was an iPod dock in the glove box (and I wasn't running the GPS on my phone this time as I had the Photomate).

If you're a lurker you may not have known that for the past two months I've been travelling around Israel, Jordan, Egypt, UK, Europe and Japan. Actually you might have had some idea from all the beer of the day photos I posted ;)